Chinese-born Canadian here, I don't know if this applies to you, but Chinese people are reluctant to talk about this with foreigners. It was broadcast on national news and all the largest cities were affected by it to a certain degree. My mother was a university teacher during the Tiananmen Protests, and she lead her own students on protest walks in her own second-tier city far away from Beijing. The older and educated generation knows about it for sure, but it's a traumatic experience that severely shook their trust in their government, hence why a lot of them keep mum about it.

It's incredibly eerie to see this effect happen in real time.I think anyone who talks about history enough can come up with the concept of the winner writing the books, but seeing on such a scale in such a short time frame, and in the age of information, is so dystopic it's quite unreal.

A lot of Americans don’t know much about the horrible shit done here on our soil. They firebombed Black Wall Street in Tulsa and most people never heard of it. People growing up there aren’t taught it. Lots of cases like that throughout the 50 states and thousands of cities with dark secrets. China has 3 times the population and much more censorship. I’m not surprised many of them don’t know.

Everytime the Tulsa massacre pops up on Reddit, there's always Oklahoma people saying they never heard about it or barely knew about it. It's crazy

Theres was the Rosewood, FL massacre in my state. Riots targeted every black man in town over a witch hunt. The only survivor is currently 106 years old and she is still trying to get the truth out. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosewood_massacre

The younger ones don't, those who were born afterwards might not know at all since all mentions of the event is banned in China.

I certainly do still remember, I was 6 years old at the time, and I saw the students marching in the streets and injured people coming to the hospital my mother worked at. Not something I'd forget, and I'm certainly going to show these information to my kids that I'm raising now in the United States. (My mother was a nurse that treated some of the injured people in the hospital, and later was brought in by the government for questioning, our entire family then decided to come to the US on political asylum grounds.)

You're right. A Chinese classmate of mine was talking about this in class recently. She said that most of her peers in school thought that it's possible it may have happened, but probably not, while her parents were sure that it had but told her not to talk about it, and her rural relatives haven't ever heard about it.

It probably was, because the way the person grabbed his arm--by the wrist, twist it around his back and then push him to move forward-- is the way that Chinese police and military are taught to grab people

This photo almost didn't exist. The photographer was observed taking the photo, and his room he was staying in was searched. The photographer had to hide the film by putting it in a plastic bag, then stuffing it in a toilet.

Another reason the internet in general should be taken way more seriously, and should be way more easily accessible. If this were taken today, it’d be eternally available to everyone, automatically—much harder to destroy than finding a tube in an apartment and opening it in a bright room.

The Internet is the single biggest force for good in our world today for this exact reason. It gives a voice to literally every connected person. Decentralizing the world's information will bring about the destruction of dictatorships faster than anything else in the history of humans.

This is also why any censorship of Internet is a dire offense. Even though you might be censoring some bad stuff, someone in power has to make that call, and it may be something that person doesn't want the world to see.

It's better that there be no technical way to censor information than to get the small benefit of censoring only very egregious things.

Looks like there was a lot of reporters in Tiananmen Square because Mikhail Gorbachev made a visit to China that week. Then the protests started and many of them left thinking they had captured the peak of action. The few reporters that photographed the Tank Man choose to stay.

"The death toll from the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre was at least 10,000 people, killed by a Chinese army unit whose troops were likened to “primitives”, a secret British diplomatic cable alleged. The newly declassified document, written little more than 24 hours after the massacre, gives a much higher death toll than the most commonly used estimates which only go up to about 3,000.

It also provides horrific detail of the massacre, alleging that wounded female students were bayoneted as they begged for their lives, human remains were “hosed down the drains”, and a mother was shot as she tried to go to the aid of her injured three-year-old daughter.

Sir Alan said previous waves of troops had gone in unarmed to disperse the protesters, many of whom were students. Then, Sir Alan wrote, “The 27 Army APCs [armoured personnel carriers] opened fire on the crowd before running over them. APCs ran over troops and civilians at 65kph [40 miles per hour].”

Sir Alan added: “Students understood they were given one hour to leave square, but after five minutes APCs attacked. Students linked arms but were mown down. APCs then ran over the bodies time and time again to make, quote ‘pie’ unquote, and remains collected by bulldozer. Remains incinerated and then hosed down drains.”

Nobody dares touch the permanent members that's why China, Russia and the US (there UK and France too) can get away with some pretty questionable things. They also have veto power over any legally binding UN resolution made in the Security Council.

Yeah the primary goal of the UN is to prevent world wars, not to prevent nations from doing bad things. On the occasions where the Security Council actually agrees on something or has no motive to interfere with the consensus, they can prevent a nation from doing bad things like committing an internal genocide, and can provide aid.

And the western world still stands by today, as the Chinese government continues to massacre dissidents, suppress free speech, and actually implement 1984 as if it was a guide.

But, western nations want all that trade with China, so no one will sanction them, like we do to Russia and Iran.

1/5th of the world's population lives in an authoritarian dystopic society, and we basically shrug and move on.

It makes me so angry.

*edit:

I want to post a response to this that will likely be buried.

I think it highlights why what is happening in China, now, is going to matter in a big way for our children and their children. What is happening to 1 in 5 children today, is going to affect what happens to 2 in 5 children soon, and so on.

Its not even that its that China will be the worlds #1 and only super power soon. Reddit and Europe loves to shit on the US but sadly the teenagers of today will live in a world where even worse countries control the world.

As much as the nationalists and communists and anarchists like to pretend that the world will be open to their ideas and revolution is just around the corner that is just not the case.

We are close to billions of people who are born and raised with being okay not having basic freedoms because stability and given a few basic needs is enough for them. A couple to a few generations of that and the world will do a complete 180 from what we have today.

Like I said, 1 in 5 people are already content to get basic necessities to live, sacrificing their rights and freedoms.

We do a lot more than shrug! We design and export their surveillance equipment. We import billions of government-subsidized goods. Our most valuable companies trip over themselves to accommodate the police state.

This is the kind of power some people in government want. There are people attracted to the power structure and they work hard to excel and be promoted within that structure. They thrive on domination forcing others to obey. See: history.

Which is why you absolutely need restrictions on who can run and be elected to office, and public office needs to be a brief stop in life, not a career path.

As it is now, those who desire power have the ability to get it without any sort of qualification, and keep it as long as they can put on a nice smile during the popularity contest that is an election.

The electorate doesn't have the time that is necessary to learn enough about the various candidates running to make informed decisions (generally), they are too busy working to put food on the table and a roof over their head. This is a recipe for disaster, one that has a slow burn that gets worse and worse over time, but in small enough increments that people simply accept it, thinking this is how it has always been.

Even good candidates can become seduced by the power they wield, or the need to bend some of their principles in order to accomplish some task while in office. It's a job that often caters to people with psychopathic tendencies, which is why they crave more and more power.

And this is a real danger for us, the plan is working and implemented and refined right over there. When our leaders go visit their leaders laugh at ours "We don't put up with shit from peasant classes, why should you?"

That's the deal. China is too powerful to fuck with. North Korea is only dangerous because we're afraid of China sticking up for them.

They say that nuclear weapons have created the most peaceful time in human history, because everyone's too afraid to use them. But that also means we're all too afraid to do anything. So powerful countries get to do whatever they want, provided it's to their own citizens or less powerful countries. That ain't peace. That's just denial.

It's not perfect, but before nukes there were major wars between world powers every few decades. This has been fairly consistent for thousands of years.

In europe there was WW2. before that there was WW1. Before that the Franco-prussian war. Before that the napoleonic wars. Just a constant series of war extending back indefinitely. In east asia before WW2 there was the start of the chinese civil war, the russo-japanese war, the first sino-japanese war, the many rebellions at the end of the Qing dynasty (including the Taiping rebellion) etc. There is a major war every few decades going back thousands of years.

We have not seen a war of that scale since the end of WW2. Nukes make it impossible to win a war, and if you can't win you won't fight. Long time periods without major wars of great powers are rare, and usually due to the world being divided into a small number of large empires that mostly get along.

That part about running over the dead and dying as a way of making an easily disposable visceral mush is exactly why i dont take all this new age kumbaya shit serious. I dont think humanity will ever reach a point where we all understand each other as individuals and respect everyones personal autonomy.

History shows time and again that given a flimsy enough reason, the right resources and a stunning lack of consequence, human beings will do some normally unfathomable things to one another.

There's a video out there in the web. Saw it once. Its an APC running over protesters and the video sent chills down my spine. All you can hear is people screaming and bones breaking and the loud sound of the engine . disturbing AF.

I was watching a documentary about the Korean war with my Chinese-born wife. She keeps saying "that's not what happened. That's not what happened." Then they get to the point where the USA is pushing up towards the north end of Korea and she says "That's where it started!"

I have a stranger story. My good friend from high school joined the Navy. When they were in China, his friend started dating a Chinese girl. As it turns out, she'd been taught that the Dalai Lama was a slave trader. According to him, she truly believed the Dalai Lama was evil. They basically gave her a bunch of information and books to help educate her.

I always think about that when people advocate for censorship in America, thinking they're being Patriotic. There are some people who want to exclude things from K-12 history curriculum, like information about McCarthyism, information on lynchings and Jim Crow, information on slave trading in the US and slavery as the main cause of the Civil War.

When I was studying Korean, most of my classmates were Chinese. None of them had ever heard of it. Their phones couldn't even access websites discussing it. I had to go to wikipedia's translated page for them to believe me (and our teacher).

Visited this place back in 2003 and it was a cloudy/rainy day which made the whole aura of this place even worse. They also told everyone in the group not to mention anything about this day and basically not to say anything about China at all.

Was in Beijing for work last November, went to visit this site, and asked my colleagues from our Beijing office about the “famous picture” and they didn’t know what I was talking about. I pulled up the image on my phone using my VPN connection, and showed it to them, and they quickly made me put away my phone and told me never to bring it up while in Beijing, and were worried our driver had heard the conversation in English. Super bizarre.

Edit: Everyone thinks I’m an idiot for bringing it up. Probably so. Turns out no one else on reddit has ever made a mistake. Was it dumb of me? Yes. Would I do it again? Absolutely not. Call it lack of intelligence or pure ignorance, but being US-born, not familiar with the tyranny of a fascist regime, culminated in what was, very clearly, a dangerous thing to do. I’ll be much more careful of things in relation to local governments and customs if I travel abroad in the future. Thanks everyone for the feedback, even if you felt the need to provide as fiercely as you knew how.

This is level of dumb is why we have to keep bailing idiots out of 3rd world dictatorships. If you're going to go to an authoritarian hell hole, A. Don't bring any shit they might see as propaganda against the regime, no matter how true it is. B. Don't talk about shit they might consider propaganda against the regime, no matter how true it is. C. Don't fuck with their propaganda, no matter how much bullshit it is. How hard is this?

You showed your Chinese colleagues this picture of Tiananmen Square, while standing in Tiananmen square, where the government massacred thousands of Chinese students for protesting said government, in China, and your colleagues were overcome with fear, because you had just shown them something extremely anti-government.

You can’t be too careful in Beijing. There are plenty of policemen undercover in TAM square. The young generation here probably wouldn’t know about the massacre but I would think your colleagues should know about it, if they are over 30. They told you told hide the photo when you showed it to them, so they knew what it stands for. Most people are not political or dare not to be political here, so they pretend they know nothing.

It is important that this act can also be seen as the power struggle between two political parties. This caused the chairman at that time (sympathetic to the students) to step down and locked up until his death 20 years later.

the military units brought in were from different provinces and they were totally unaware of the politics involved. They were told the crowds were treasonous mobs trying to overthrow the government. The soldiers didn't know they were attacking students.

Our PM, 12 days later, made a speech describing footsoldiers moving through the square murdering anyone who was still alive -- with either guns or bayonet. During the speech he issued humanitarian visas to the thousands of Chinese students presently in our country, then did the same for their families, after zero consultation with the rest of the government (IIRC, someone said Mate you can't just do that, and he answered No, I just did. It's done). Those became 40,000+ permanent visas, to ensure none of those people would ever have to return.

And it's 100% because yeah -- people were crushed. Fucking crushed. It was an abomination.

Yeah tanks crushed people, looked like minced meat on the road. An ambulance was rushing wounded to a hospital and was shot at multiple times by the army until it stopped. You can google the nsfl footage easily.

Tom Brokaw is a customer. Last month I was asking why he was riding kind of a junker bicycle. He told me it reminded him of the one he and his cameraman used 29 years ago in China. He was able to smuggle the first video of Tiananmen Square out of China. It was taken through the hole in a box they mount on the rear rack of the bicycle. He was clearly very proud of the accomplishment.

BBC's John Simpson has similar stories of having to smuggle out footage in harrowing conditions. It's a total cliche and it wasn't even that long ago but those were the days when reporters were total pros.

10 years ago I worked (in the US) with a Chinese lady who was here working trying to get her green card. She has absolutely zero knowledge about what happened at Tiananmen Square. Also, when Tibet was brought up she became very nervous, looking up from the cubicles to see if anyone else was overhearing, and didn't want to be part of the discussion.

I lived in China for about a year about 15 years ago. One of my young teachers told me a lot of people in China, even a lot of those in the surrounding areas of TS, never knew anything had happened. Pretty unreal. But I was also told because the population is so large, even a little bit of dissent can cause a huge problem. The analogy used was ‘it’s like being a single parent with 20 kids.’ How would you keep them all in line, and not harming each other?

My dad works with a lot of Chinese and makes a point of bringing Tiananmen Square to every new guy at some point in their first couple weeks. I think in the hundreds of guys he's talked to, three of them knew about it. Freaking crazy stuff.

A Chinese girl in one of my classes had no idea this ever happened. The rest of us were pretty shocked she had no clue of such a pivotal moment in her country’s history, and she remarked how we probably aren’t taught about how us Brits were involved in the slave trade. Her face when we told her it was normally a part of our school curriculum from age 13 was quite a picture.

China occupies Tibet and oppress the people living there whilst also trying to fill it up with Han Chinese. Taiwan is the effectivley independent since the Chinese civil war. The government of the ROC escaped too Taiwan and was able to keep the communists out.

I used to think the German wall fell after edit: before I was born. Turns out I was actually born in a country called "West Germany". All these years I've been lying and telling people I was born in "Germany".

It's very fascinating, there were many military factions (? not sure if that is the proper term). Some were very kind and nice to the students. Others were brutal and beat them and attacked them. The vast majority of the soldiers were probably not ready to kill an innocent man in front of them.

There were also internal conflicts from high up leaders including some who refused to condone action against the students and "fell on their sword" figuratively.

Not that weird really. China is censoring everything and the population of china has never seen this footage.

There are only really 2 possibilities here.

Either the people who ran into the streets towards him and pulled him away were all undercover police, who rushed him off into a secret prison and executed him.

Or the people who were actually trying to help him; other students that dragged him away to safety where he disappeared into the crowed. If that would be the cases it's unlikely he would even know that he became famous, because of the heavy censorship and even if he would be aware, he would put his life in danger by talking about it.

Even if China killed him, they would never admit it nor would they say anything about his identity.

It's easy to make compelling arguments for both theories but we most likely will never learn the truth.

My own opinion, for what its worth, is that he got arrested and executed right away. There are reports of other people doing exactly what he was doing, but it's the only photograph of someone doing it what makes him so special. We focus on the students who got killed but what is often forgotten is that they arrested thousands of people during the protests, many who never came back and there aren't even estimates of how many people really lost their lives during and after the protests on the Tiananmen Square.

Please don't ever forget. My mother and father protested there. They didn't go the day the army came. They were offered an opportunity two years previously to study in America for graduate school but didn't accept. The death of Mao left them optimistic things would change and become better like other countries.

Then 1989 happened. My parents lost friends to the government's brutality. We just visited the Forbidden City and Tianamen Square yesterday and much of the square is closed off because Xi Jinping is paranoid and tyrannical. Most of the youth have no idea what happened. 1989 still sits like an open wound for my family.

When I was in China in 2009, I tried googling "Tiananmen square riot" on the Chinese Google and only pictures of Tiananmen square were displayed. No trace of this event. That was the epitome of internet censorship Edit: spelling.

Many thanks to you(s) who still post these pics on reddit. I am a Chinese from Hong Kong. The CCP has been trying really hard to make us forget this completely. Even in Hong Kong some people are starting to forget the massacre and rebrand it as just a riot/incident. Thanks again.

The whole story of the protests is incredible. It amazes me that Hollywood hasn't yet made a film about it and it makes me wonder whether it has something to do with not wanting to piss off the Chinese government.

This comment is going to go in a different direction than some of the others in this thread lauding the bravery of the students, talking about democracy, overthrow of communism, etc. which paint a bit of an idealized/romanticized picture.

And the point of this comment--which I am not going to try to pass off as my own ideas--is not to belittle/deny the events that occurred during the Tiananmen square protests. It's just something new I learned recently that I think offers a different perspective than what many people hear about.

"[Wen Huang] says that the students weren't fighting for democracy, at least not as it's been widely understood in the West. He—and other former student activists from China—say the protests were an expression of sheer pleasure in living, a rock-n-roll bravado, a desire for a better future. But they never wanted to see American-style democracy or the overthrow of the Communist government, or anything so grand."

Here's an excerpt--hope you find it as interesting as I did

Wen Huang

It never occurred to us that we wanted to overthrow the Communist government. It was like the Communist party was a God-given thing. And we were born with it. We're going to die with it. And the only way to make it work for us is just to have some modest reforms within the government.

Ira Glass

But Wen says that for most of the students he knew, most of the students in the movement, he believes, there was another motivation besides politics, an equally compelling, if not more compelling, motivation.

Wen Huang

It was really like a big party. I never heard about Woodstock until I came to the US.

Ira Glass

Woodstock, yeah.

Wen Huang

Woodstock. And then later on, I watched a video tape. And then suddenly, I realized that the student movement in 1989 was just like a big-- similar to the Woodstock experience.

Ira Glass

Why? What were you seeing that was similar in 1989 in China, in Tiananmen Square, and in Shanghai that was similar to what was going on at Woodstock?

Wen Huang

The festive atmosphere and the playfulness. And we were singing pop songs, and people playing guitars.

Ira Glass

It was exciting, Wen says. Midterms were coming up. Papers were due. And everybody would skip class together to go to demonstrations. This is not to say that there was not political idealism behind all this. There was. But as one of the best known student leaders, Chai Ling, said in an article in TheNewYorker magazine commemorating the 10th anniversary of Tiananmen Square, the demonstrations, even the hunger strikes weren't primarily political as far as she was concerned. It was about a kind of sheer pleasure in living, she said, a rock and roll bravado. Wen Huang agrees.

Wen Huang

I think that was kind of accurate statement. I think there was more of an honest assessment of what's motivated us to take part in this movement. Because I noticed when I first came out here, the student leaders who escaped China--

Ira Glass

The student leaders who escaped, uh-huh.

Wen Huang

The student leaders who escaped China, when they came over here, they exaggerated the motivation. They portrayed themselves as such democracy fighters, as if they knew so much about democracy. And that has a lot to do with how Americans have this romantic vision of the Tiananmen Square movement.

...

Wen Huang

I think that my general impression of the Western media, their coverage of Tiananmen Square is they tend to romanticize the movement. When I came over here, the first things, people started to call me "democracy fighter." I always cringe at that idea when people start to-- of course, I like the treatment.

I remember one day I was invited to talk about Tiananmen Square. That's the first year I was in Springfield, Illinois. I went to talk to a civic group about Tiananmen Square and human rights in China. And I had some pictures of me marching in Tiananmen Square.

So try to impress audience, I show them some pictures. And then the organizer of the speech immediately started to refer to me as "a democracy fighter." And then they all stood up and clapped hands. I felt like I was a hero. I kind of liked the treatment.

But then also, I felt obligated to tell them that I really didn't know anything about democracy at that time. So I just said, "I wasn't really a democracy fighter. I had no idea what democracy was." And they were little disappointed.

I mean doesn't that makes it look worse on the Communist government? These students weren't hardcore protesters that we see here. They were kids on a rebel phase and that still got them such a brutal punishment.

Feel free to post your own pictures, but please read the rules first (see below), and note that we are not a catch-all for general images (of screenshots, comics, etc.)

r/pics Rules

1.

R1: No screenshots. No added text/emoji/scribbles.

(1A) No screenshots or pictures of screens.

(1B) No pictures with added/superimposed digital text, emojis, and "MS Paint"-like scribbles. Exceptions to this rule include watermarks serving to credit the original author, and blurring/boxing out of personal information. "Photoshopped", or otherwise manipulated images are allowed.

2.

R2: No porn or gore.

No porn or gore. Artistic nudity is allowed. NSFW comments must be tagged. Posting gratuitous materials may result in an immediate and permanent ban.

3.

R3: No personal info/social media/"Missing"/Doxing

No personal information, in posts or comments. No direct links to any Social Media. No Missing/Found posts for people or property. A license plate is not PI.

Stalking, harassment, witch hunting, or doxxing will not be tolerated and will result in a ban.

Submissions must link directly to a specific image file or to a website with minimal ads. We do not allow blog hosting of images ("blogspam"), but links to albums on image hosting websites are okay. Ads in album titles or descriptions are not allowed.

6.

R6: no animated image posts

No animated images, no youtube links. This applies to all file types. Animated images in comments are fine.

7.

R7: Civility

We enforce a standard of common decency and civility here. Please be respectful to others. Personal attacks, bigotry, fighting words, otherwise inappropriate behavior or content, comments that insult or demean a specific user or group of users will be removed. Regular or egregious violations will result in a ban.